


Evil Don't Look Like Anything

by skyline



Series: Stardust [6]
Category: Big Time Rush
Genre: Hunger Games AU, James!Annie, Kendall!Finnick, M/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-09 07:58:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyline/pseuds/skyline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the inside, he is split logs, an inferno, burning and burning like a beach bonfire, but on the outside he is just a boy in a sea shanty, with salt thick on his skin and iron in his bones. Paralyzed, hands tied. He cannot fight the Capitol crowd, grinning barracuda grins, watching Kendall like they want to lick the blood from his teeth. </p><p>OR James reflects on Kendall being a whore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Evil Don't Look Like Anything

**Author's Note:**

> Stylistically, this is heavily influenced by what I've been reading lately, ask for references and I will provide. 
> 
> Mega props to jblostfan16 for the awesome beta.

Sixty Six and the logo is corpse blue, bloated and ugly like the floaters that wash up on shore after a big storm, lips pastry-glazed with sand, hair laced through with seaweed bows. Every time it flashes on screen James thinks of dead men, spongy skin and fish nibbled cheeks, all dressed up for a tea party with mermaids. He reaches for Kendall’s hand, but Kendall is a drowned boy, fresh born from storm tossed waves, empty space in his wake. He stands on stage next to purple-blue and two skinny, terrified kids with white-blond hair, the color of thrush. They are rocks tied to his feet, dragging him down, down, down, until he is sitting on the bottom of the sea with old bones and compost and sludge-black sediment, digging his fingers for purchase where there is none, not at all, not even a little bit. The Capitol doesn’t leave hand holds, just volcanic ash and femur chips and the occasional galleon winking by, currents creating an alluvial fan from strands of gold-blond-saffron as Kendall watches everything slip away.  
  
His mouth spins whirlpools, bubbles and viscosity but no actual noise- _smile pretty for the cameras, Victor_ \- and he looks up at the boy-men and girl-women who came before him, who are stiff and rigid as mastheads, wooden whorl cheeks and empty splinter smiles, yes, yes, smile for violence and blood and the sharks sure to follow.  
  
James bites his own mouth honey-amber-red, cuts his nails into his couch and ignores his mom when she tells him that tall ships won’t build themselves, because can’t she see, doesn’t she know? James cannot pull himself away, not from this, mackerel skies and mare’s tails, all his hatches battened down, but Kendall is still a riptide stronger than anything he knows.  
  
His image on screen is shaky, unreachable, a ripple in a veil of water. He is a mentor for the first time in his life, but he is not very good at it.  
  
The kids die.  
  
“Everyone dies,” Kendall says dismissively, once he’s back home. “Eventually.”  
  
“Stop trying to be brave all the time and let me help you,” James begs, unheard, unheard, always talking to deaf ears. He’d get more of a response from a conch shell, the distant call of the sea better than words, or a lack thereof.  
  
Kendall just grins, skeletal, wan. “I’m okay.”  
  
 _Okay_ has been redefined over the past year and a half. Screams line the curve of the _o_ , connotations of fear lurk in the abstract form of the _k_ , nightmares bundle inside the gaping maw of the _a_ , and a question mark lies in the _y_ ; will this ever end?  
  
Will it?  
  
Will it really?  
  
“Okay,” James replies softly, pulling Kendall into his chest, and he ignores how Kendall goes spiny as a sea urchin in his arms.  
  
That night James dreams of puffy cheeks, distended abdomens, empty eye sockets, and that damned logo, moonlit-lagoon blue, the color of decay and death and sorrow. When he wakes up to a high pitched note of panic, he worries it might have fallen from his own lips.  
  
James touches his mouth, the pink-red give cemetery silent. Ragged breath across the room tips him off. He is not the perpetrator, not tonight, and he does not know what it is to be haunted.  
  
(In District Four, they put dead bodies out to sea in burning boats so that their souls can never return to shore.)  
  
Kendall yells and sobs and chokes on his own shame, all on the inside, but James can still see it pooling there in his luminescent eyes, pupils black as still water, irises thin silver rings. James beckons him down off the ledge, the same way he’s been doing night after endless night, tugged from the dark abyss of his dreamscape by terror that is so sharp and poignant James can taste it on Kendall’s skin when they kiss. He allows Kendall to climb over his body, thighs on either side of James’s hips, lips needy, starved (and oh, the things James knows about hunger).  
  
Kendall kisses him sloppy and gropes low, and James doesn’t know what to do with his hands because Kendall is traumatized, broken, really, really fucked up, but Kendall is also beautiful and hot and doing that thing with his tongue. He drives James insane the same way he’s been doing since whatever this is started, since back before James even knew what to do with his own dick, and it’s worse now that he’s got an idea, all kinds of ideas. He’s spent the last year and a half trying to be patient, saying no when he wants to say yes, fervently not taking advantage of his poor, wretched Victor of a best friend, but what is he supposed to do with this? Kendall has hands and a mouth and too much skin, and James is just not this strong. He is teenage hormones and love, way too much love, and being patient is really hard when the other party won’t get with the program.  
  
He arches up into Kendall’s heat, helpless, because this is the boy that starred in his very first wet dream, and at least ninety two percent of the ones since then.  
  
(The outlying eight percent isn’t even worth mentioning, because they did not involve Kendall, and Kendall is everything.)  
  
Waves roar in his ears, drowning out every ounce of his common sense. He stutters out, “Are you sure?” because James isn’t sure, not even a little bit.  
  
“Yeah,” Kendall’s eyes glitter like oil slicks, like James painted his fingertips across the pupils and left all the dirt and grime and the rainbow shine of his career path right there on Kendall’s skin.  
  
“Are you sure?” James asks again.  
  
“Just do it.” Kendall heaves a breath, and James can’t argue anymore.  
  
In bed, James curses- _Fuck. Fuck, dude._ _Fuck_ \- and Kendall talks to the ghosts of people James has never met. He is noisy just to counteract their screams and the way they echo in the chambers of his own mind.  
  
James cannot hear any screams, but he listens to his staccato heartbeat in his ears, like he is underwater, and for him there is nothing alive tonight but his racing blood and Kendall. Kendall, who begs for forgiveness, for mercy, for absolution, but none of those things are James’s to give.  
  
Kendall wriggles in James’s hands, squirms like a caught fish, and his eyelids are blue-black in the darkness. He is beautiful, breathtaking, perfect. James holds steady as an anchor, his hand fasted with Kendall’s like a promise.  
  
It’s everything he’s ever wanted.  
  
Kendall takes the life James breathes into him, swallowing it down and then greedily asking for more (more, more, it’s never actually enough, “ _James_ ,” he gasps he pants he pleads).  
  
“Harder.”  
  
“I’ll hurt you,” James forces out, because yes, harder, good, that sounds good, but Kendall is contorted beneath him and he needs to be very kind. He needs to be the gentleman, he needs-  
  
Kendall wraps James’s fingers around his own throat, his pulse strong, real, there. “So hurt me.”  
  
He is wild, he is fierce, and the sky is blown out in the face of his gaze (his hands, his knees, his thighs tight at James’s hips). James has to turn him on his stomach just to get away from it, from the intensity and the shame and the bite of guilt in his bones. He will not say no, even if it is a thing that he should do, a kiss to the neck and the spine and right between Kendall’s shoulder blades, a touch of lips to skin and the hope that it’s enough.  
  
James thinks and hopes and prays, okay, okay, evening red and morning gray. 

  


\---

  
Sixty Seven and Kendall’s just turned sixteen. James resents being younger, so close to his own sixteenth birthday that he can taste it in the air, adulthood sitting pretty on his tongue. He already feels like a grownup who has fucked and fought and watched good people die, but he’s got nothing on Kendall, second year a mentor, second year enslaved.  
  
Kendall doesn’t take it so hard this time; he has summer in his eyes, fragmented green like the sun-dappled ponds they would jump in as kids. He’s got his brave face on, his warrior smirk and too much skin on display, a lion trying so hard not to be a lamb. Every time he smiles they flashback to his games, to Sixty Five when he wore red like camouflage, tasted it on his tongue and let it pool in the crevices of his hands. People school around him during these, brightly colored clown fish congratulating Kendall on the past that they know nothing about. James has spent the whole of a year extracting the Capitol’s claws from Kendall’s psyche, plucking porcupine needles and bee stingers and cactus pines free and clear, and he will keep on, again and again, the next year, and the next.  
  
Even knowing that, he watches with gritted teeth, but what can he do? On the inside, he is split logs, an inferno, burning and burning like a beach bonfire, but on the outside he is just a boy in a sea shanty, with salt thick on his skin and iron in his bones. Paralyzed, hands tied. He cannot fight the Capitol crowd, grinning barracuda grins, watching Kendall like they want to lick the blood from his teeth.  
  
(Everyone in District Four looks at James, and Kendall says they can’t help it, but now everyone in the whole wide nation is looking at Kendall too. Looking and wanting and coveting, and James cannot swallow past the lump in his throat.)  
  
Kendall comes home on a day when the winds wrestle and fight, sunshine a halo at his back. They head out to the beach and fuck in the sand, hard and fast and rough and messy, exactly how Kendall likes it.  
  
James makes sure that he likes it, because for as long as James can remember, Kendall has been his and he has been Kendall’s, the two of them fitted tighter together than the opposing sides of an oyster shell, a pearl of something- maybe love- clutched between them. He does not plan on ever letting that change, cannot allow it, tries to prove it with his hands and his tongue and his dick.  
  
He says, “I don’t want you to go back.”  
  
And Kendall says, “I have to.”  
  
“Why?” He is whining, and he is not at all ashamed.  
  
Kendall kicks back against the sand and tells him, “You can’t find deliverance in love alone.”  
  
Deliverance, pah. What does James know about that? His hands are grimy, black beneath the nails, too used to makingcraftingbuilding.  
  
He honestly has no idea what it is like to destroy.  
  
James squeezes grains of sand that sparkle white hot in the sunlight before slipping through his fingertips. He asks, “When did you get so cryptic?”, and that is the part he hates most about this, that somehow the little boy who was his best friend is turning into a man that he doesn’t know at all. Their hearts used to beat their own secret language, and now Kendall’s plain English is hard for him to wrap his head around.  
  
Kendall shrugs. James tries, “You really believe that?”  
  
“I believe that the world’s a dangerous place. I can help, James. I can. I _am_.”  
  
James cannot disagree. He does not understand danger, not like he should, not like Kendall does, but he thinks it looks something like a whipping post (splintered from overuse, rotted through from too much salt air), or maybe it is shiny hard and colorful (like a harpoon gun and blood floating inky in the ocean, spun thin as water paints), or maybe danger exactly resembles a dead Tribute (slack across the blood-soaked ground in the forefront of the golden, shining cornucopia). He cannot disagree, but he can tell Kendall, fiercely, “You’re mine. You belong to me.”  
  
Kendall grins wide and crooked. He nuzzles James’s neck, lips raising the hair on his skin as he asks, “Who else would I belong to?”  
  
James does not have an answer to that, but Kendall pouts his lips like a porpoise, butting his head up against James’s armpit. He mutters, “Let’s go again,” and so they do, lying beneath bright blue, puffy clouds.  
  
Life would be better if they could latch onto one and float away.

  


\----

  
Sixty Eight and Kendall is a figurine, broken glass and polish scrubbed thin. From afar, between the static lines of James’s old TV set, he wears his porcelain smile. James strains to touch it, but all his fingers find is the vast expanse of antique glass and the long cold rod of the television antenna, silvered like a weapon in his hands. He huddles in the dune hills of his couch and waits for lightning to strike so that he too can be a china doll boy.  
  
James thought of volunteering this year, but Kendall told him no, never, _absolutely not_ , and James listened. He thinks it’s for the best. He does not know how to deal with porcelain; James is iron, he is steel, he is rivets and nuts and bolts. He wears engine grease instead of Capitol patented berry rouge, and the only finery he owns are pearls plucked straight from the mouths of oysters, seedy and sad. He only wants to be in the Capitol, to be close to Kendall, to fix his fragmented, fake delight and paint real love on his lips.  
  
That is not how it works out.  
  
Kendall gets home, and his smile shatters. It rakes over James’s insides, sharp as shark’s teeth. Up close, even the jut of his cheekbones makes James bleed.  
  
He stands naked in the middle of his bedroom, wearing the green tinged fingerprints of another man on his skin. There is a hickey blossoming across Kendall’s collarbone and there are scratch marks etched deep into his back.  
  
(He is dirty, filthy, used.)  
  
He catches James looking at the bruises on his hipbones and says, “We don’t have to talk about this.”  
  
James’s mouth tastes like bile and blood. He is hemorrhaging inside, he cannot breathe. Even his strong, metal heart cannot take this knife wound. “ _Kendall_.”  
  
“I did it for us, okay? For Katie, and mom. For _you_.” Kendall’s voice trembles, shakes, broken shards of glass in his throat. But for the first time in his life, James does not care.  
  
“How can you even say this is for _me_?”  
  
Kendall flinches, eyes sparking fire. He insists, “You don’t know what’s happening. I have to protect you all or, _or_ \- god, James. I can’t lose any of you.”  
  
It’s hard to take him seriously with the imprint of hands around his throat. Kendall looks worse than when he returned from the Games, because the Capitol was there to sew him up and put him back together again. Now he is bruises, cuts, and scratches, and James wants to ask if he’s finally getting it rough enough.  
  
He bites his tongue, tastes blood, bites harder.  
  
This terrible, horrible thought occurs to him, and he blurts it out before he can analyze it because no, no, _no_ , Kendall wouldn’t take this from him. “Did _you_ fuck anyone?”  
  
“I-“ Kendall pauses, guilty. His eyes are China-glazed, empty. He says, “I give as good as I get.”  
  
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” James grabs for Kendall’s dick, holds its familiar weight in his hand and doesn’t understand how Kendall can possibly be getting half hard from this. “I know you got fucked. Did. You. Fuck. Anyone?” He repeats, angry and terrified, because Kendall has never fucked James.  
  
James has begged and pleaded and wanted for so long, has been waiting to feel Kendall inside of him. Every time he asked, Kendall would say _no_ , that he didn’t want to hurt James, that it wasn’t the right time yet. He had a million reasons.  
  
“There were women, James, I had to. And some of the guys like-“  
  
A million.  
  
Or maybe only one, one reason, one secret.  
  
James cuts him off, blood boiling. His voice is quiet, but also full of things he doesn’t know how to name, like the crushing pressure at the bottom of the sea. “Am I that repulsive?”  
  
Kendall’s eyes widen. “What?”  
  
“You didn’t think I could handle it the way you wanted? Hard?” He shoves Kendall back. “Fast? So you just gave it away like, like- fuck, you are a _whore_.”  
  
Kendall’s face shutters closed, and James never understood that expression before, never got that a person can actually close up shop, hide away all the parts of themselves that have been open and vulnerable until now. He thought he knew what Kendall looked like wounded, but this is brand spanking new, a mask covering a mask, like nothing James has ever seen.  
  
He almost takes vindictive pleasure in it.  
  
Almost.  
  
Soft, timid, Kendall says, “That’s not-“  
  
James does not wait to hear what it’s _not_. He puts his fist through the Knight’s wall and walks the hell away.  
  
“Nonono, _stop_ ,” Kendall trips over his own feet to get dressed, to chase James out onto the walkway leading away from Victor’s Village, straight to the beach. “James, please. James!”  
  
The plaintive note thrills down James’s spine, settles in his gut and plagues him until he chokes out, “ _Why_?”  
  
“I told you, I have to protect you.”  
  
“Protect me from what?”  
  
Kendall’s quiet, waves rolling in to lick his knees before darting away, afraid he might lash out.  
  
James nods to himself. He says, “Don’t go back to the Capitol.”  
  
“I have to go back. There’s more going on here than you can see.”  
  
“Then tell me. Fuck, Kendall. Stop treating me like a little kid and tell me what the hell is happening.”  
  
“It’s better if you don’t know.”  
  
Sure. Fine. Great.  
  
Silence creates canyons, abysses and trenches that separate the two of them in a way they’ve never experienced before, and when Kendall asks, “Are you jealous?” James refuses to dignify it with an answer, refuses to admit to the hurricane force winds whipping through his ribcage or the accompanying shrapnel that has already lodged in his heart.  
  
Quietly, Kendall says, “You don’t have to be. You _shouldn’t_ be.”  
  
“I shouldn’t? So you won’t care if I go fuck someone else? I could, I so could, it would be easy for me to fuck other people too,” James tells him, even though the idea of anyone but Kendall makes him feel ill.  
  
Kendall’s gaze sharpens. His voice cracks, and his response is immediate, raw emotion tearing at his esophagus. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t ever-“  
  
“Then why is it okay for you?”  
  
“It’s not okay for me. It’s not. But I didn’t have a fucking choice.”  
  
“There’s always a choice.”  
  
“No. Not when the alternative is watching everyone I love _disappear_ ,” he makes air quotes around the word, says it the same way he would _die_. Kendall sucks in through his nose, oxygen permeating his lungs, forcing his shoulders to slump. He admits, “Letting something happen to you isn’t a choice at all.”  
  
“It is,” James retorts, because Kendall will not get mercy or forgiveness or absolution from him. “You were just too scared to make it.”  
  
Kendall recoils like James has physically punched him, and James can’t even begin to feel bad for it. He’s always needed Kendall way more than Kendall has ever needed him, and the person who needs the most loses, right?  
  
He should have seen this coming.  
  
“Fuck, James, I think of you, when I’m with them. Always,” Kendall swears.  
  
James doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse. Kendall is still James’s, except he’s not anymore. The Hunger Games reduced him to ashes, and the boy who is rising from them, charcoal gray, is twisted inside.  
  
“Stop lying.”  
  
“I’m not lying. I love you. I’ve always fucking loved you,” Kendall yells, loud across the beach and the sand and the surf, amplified somehow when it reverberates through James’s chest.  
  
It’s the first time he's ever said it out loud. James's steps falter, skidding to a halt on too-soft sand, and Kendall takes advantage, tries to kiss him.  
  
James shoves him away. “What are you doing?”  
  
“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory,” Kendall replies, rolling his eyes. They’ve gone dark green, deep water pierced by sunlight, so heartbreakingly beautiful that James almost cannot bring himself to say the words. But he does, he manages, blurts out on a breath:  
  
“I don’t want you to touch me anymore.”

\---

  
Halfway to Sixty Nine and there is a squall kicking up a ruckus up and down the coastline, but James does not care. Brutal sun and skyrocketing temperatures don’t matter either. Come heat, come hurricanes, bring cyclones and monsoons. No natural disaster, hell or high water, will be able to match the way that wind whistles through James’s chest, through the big empty space that is white capped waves and nothingness.  
  
Days stretch, painful, long. Salt water scrapes his skin raw. The sun turns his skin brown, brown, and browner still. Camille asks, “Are you going to forgive him, ever?”  
  
Bitter, the mercury taste of undercooked fish, James spits, “He doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”  
  
Camille has sea-lion eyes, warm, intelligent, and much too gentle. She says, “No. But, you deserve to be happy. And you’re not. Without Kendall, you’re not happy, James.”  
  
“I know,” and of course he does. He is not as much of an iron-boy as his parents might’ve wished, not sturdy or strong or stalwart. He craves the warmth of Kendall’s hands against his spine, the fishing hook curve of his smile and the familiar comfort of his voice. Every day he goes without, James’s bones oxidize. For the better part of the summer and fall, his internal organs have rusted through, heart smoking like the ruins of District Thirteen, and he wants to make Kendall hurt. He wants to mark him, inside and out, but he cannot.  
  
It’s been six months since they’ve even spoken.  
  
Some mornings, James will see him boarding his mother’s trawler, shadows pressed like fingerprints beneath his sunken eyes.  
  
“He can’t sleep,” Katie says when she spots James reconnoitering, the tone of her voice disapproving.  
  
“Neither can I,” James replies, ruffling her hair.  
  
His mother recognizes the signs, knows more than James has ever deigned to tell her. She suggests, “Maybe it’s time you find a nice girl,” but James doesn’t want anyone else. Despite himself, Kendall has infected James, from his heart to his lungs to his muscles to his bloodstream. His love spiders out, an entire second nervous system that screams and screams and screams Kendall’s name. There is no part of James that he has not infiltrated, and James sees that changing just right of _never_.  
  
In mid-winter, the Peacekeepers end up harpooning a man off the prow of Kendall’s mom’s ship, claiming he was trying to instigate something, to run. James listens to Camille detail the account, eyes bright with a kind of fascinated bloodlust that sends terror blaring off in James’s stomach. Before Kendall there was only Camille, with her thick dark hair and the fierce way she bared her teeth at anyone who dared to pick on either of them. Berry stained lips and a halfcocked smile, she was a force of nature, a tiny natural disaster with mischief and leftover fruit in the corner of her mouth, and she was also James’s best friend. He figured they’d get married someday, in that abstract way that little boys always think they’ll marry their best friends, and when he got older and figured out that Camille was not the princess bride he was searching for, there weren’t any hard feelings at all.  
  
If anything, it brought them closer, and that is why he is scared. Camille has been training to be a Career since basically forever, and more than once James has done the gamut with her; sprinting along the beach, breaststrokes in the sea, sparring with knives and learning to how to become an extension of a weapon. In the abstract it was fun, but nothing has been fun since Sixty Five and watching Kendall lose his soul, and James doesn’t want her to throw herself head first into danger.  
  
(He can picture her doing it anyway, entire universes spinning off the sequins of some lovely dress, the reflection of light dizzying against the dark walls.)  
  
He says, “That’s awful.”  
  
Camille smirks and says, “Not for you. Kendall saw it all.”  
  
James knows what she’s getting at, and he’s still mad, so mad that his vision reddens when he even considers it, but he heads over to the Knight’s anyway. He stands in the doorway and builds a monument to indecision, should he or shouldn’t he, should he or- he knocks.  
  
“Are you alright?” James asks guardedly when the door swings back, and Kendall stares at him, still and sorrowful, like a whale with weary, kelp-colored eyes.  
  
He crosses his arms defensively and replies, “Does it matter if I am?”  
  
James wants to shake him, to rattle his brain around until he gets that that is exactly the point of all of this, because Kendall matters so damn much, is a hundred thousand million times better than the life he’s handpicked. Instead he drops his gaze and keeps a sarcastic comment from spilling out all over Mrs. Knight’s handmade welcome mat.  
  
Carefully, he swallows and says, “I was just checking.”  
  
Kendall stares him down, and there is a tragedy to be found here. Everyone wants Kendall Knight’s heart, everyone, except the person it belongs to.  
  
(James thinks if he really had Kendall’s heart he would cup it in his palms and squeeze. Turnabout is fair play, and that wouldn’t even be close to what Kendall’s done to him, the way he’s bitten into James’s ventricles shiny apply red, sharp teeth against muscle, swallowing pieces of him until he owned him, completely.)  
  
James walks away, turns tail and runs.  
  
He knows that he’ll cave soon. He can’t hold a grudge against Kendall for this long because it hurts being away from him, hurts so bad that it’s like trying to breathe underwater.  
  
(This is what real love affairs are about, a lack of oxygen and pain that never really ends.)  
  
Sure, Kendall said he had reasons, and James suspects they might even be good ones. But he does not know how to forgive without leveling the playing field.  
  
Dak Zevon is a welder, a kid who works for James’s dad when they can afford to pay him, which isn’t often. James seeks him out, soaking wet, fresh from the beach. He’s done everything he can to look like sunshine and sea salt and sex, and he’s apparently succeeded. All James has to do is bat his eyes once, twice, before Dak is holding fire to his skin. He bends James over a scrap of heap metal and it’s over almost as quick as it’s begun, but that’s the point. It’s over.  
  
Giving up feels exactly like revenge, but so what?  
  
Now James and Kendall are fucking even.

\---

  
Sixty Nine, and James loses himself in the smooth metal of the blowtorch under his fingers and the heavy, hot weight of the sun on his neck, turning him golden where he feels pale and sickly.  
  
He refuses to watch the Games alone anymore. He can’t take the silence or the way its ghostly hands are spider-web clingy, tickling over the ridges of his spine and the shell of his ears. When foul weather- seagull, seagull, sit in the sand, it’s never good when you’re on land- finally forces him inside, he hides out in the safety of Camille’s home, surrounded by the familiar faces of her family as the drama unfolds.  
  
On screen it pours. The arena turns to mud that sucks Tributes down and will not let them go, a jilted lover with earthen hands. James cannot hear the sound of the TV over the noise of the monsoon pounding down on Camille’s tin roof, but he can clearly see the look on Kendall’s face when Four’s Tributes both go down in a tangle of limbs and blood that turns the mud to red clay.  
  
James tries not to care.  
  
He still has to force bile down during the mentors’ side show, the commentary section where Kendall is so foreign he’s extraterrestrial, and they call him a whore and they call him a god, and sometimes James will catch someone using endearments like _sweetcheeks_ or _honeypie_ or worst of all, _lover_ , emphasized by a gentle touch to his face. Kendall always leans into it, always, and it’s hard for James to tell if the motion is practiced or if he genuinely enjoys it when strangers put their hands all over him.  
  
Kendall is a star, but he is also dying, burning brilliant white hot from the pearly sheen of his teeth to the soles of his feet to the soft inside of his knees, where paying clients lick him smooth, weathered as a pebble on the shore.  
  
(A girl with dark hair and a vicious smile comes out triumphant in the Games, and James wonders if she’ll get Kendall as a victory prize.)  
  
Half a month later, and Kendall is home, at his door, asking, begging, “Don’t ignore me anymore, please, god, look, you just-“  
  
“Kendall, you can’t-“  
  
“-you’re James. You’re big and strong and beautiful, the most beautiful thing in this whole damn world, and I need you to be safe.”  
  
“Kendall-“  
  
“Safe, James, just be _safe_.”  
  
They don’t use firearms in the games- too easy, over too fast- but everyone in Panem knows what it’s like to be on the wrong end of a Peacekeeper’s rifle. That’s what the first touch of Kendall’s lips is, when he throws himself at James; the cold barrel of a gun, awe and fear building to a fever pitch beneath James’s ribs. It’s over before it begins, and Kendall pulls back and glances around, furtively searching palm fronds and smooth sea glass chimes for spying eyes or something while James tries and fails to remember how to breathe.  
  
Kendall is a disease, hiding dormant in his nervous system, and all it takes is a single blow to the head to shake him back loose again, back into James’s bloodstream like he never even left. He whispers, “If the Capitol wants to own me, let them. I don’t care about anything but keeping you far, far away from them all. Please. _Please_.”  
  
Kendall said love is not deliverance, but it is the closest thing that James knows.  
  
One more year, he thinks. One more Reaping, skip forward a few months, and James will be nineteen. Ineligible.  
  
Maybe then Kendall will quit.  
  
\---  
  
A few weeks before Seventy and everyone knows what Kendall Knight is.  
  
At school James digs crescent shaped welts into the palms of his hands- _at least my boyfriend isn’t turning tricks in the Capitol_ , a classmate says, laughing like it’s even close to funny- the shape of his knees – _what’s it like to fuck a whore_?-, bruises his own thighs from gripping so tight, but he does not let his smile crack. He grins and bears it because he has faith. Inexplicable, inexorable, ingrained so deeply in his being that he can’t shake it off.  
  
He believes in Kendall, or he is trying.  
  
James asks questions, like _what was the first time like_ and _do you enjoy it_ and _does it mean anything_?  
  
“Scary, it’s not awful, and no,” Kendall says, “Sex doesn’t mean anything.”  
  
“Well then why don’t we stop having it?” James retorts, and he regrets it for the next few weeks when his balls turn bluer than deep ocean. When the strike finally ends, he scrapes his teeth over the skin of Kendall’s neck, over fading red made by someone else while Kendall keens and wants and asks for more, more, more, always fucking more.  
  
(James wants to wreck the pale expanse of his skin, but he can’t, he won’t, it’s not supposed to be like this. Love is gentle, love is kind, love is not a brutal storm that tears palm trees from the shore and leaves bodies bleeding out in the sand.)  
  
Later, Kendall reminds him quietly, “I think of you.”  
  
“Always?”  
  
In their new, fragile beast of a relationship, they do not lie. “No. Not always.”  
  
His heart is a savage thing, vines creeping through the spaces in his ribs, overgrown, thorny and terrible.  
  
James has not figured out if he likes the truth very much.  
  
\---  
  
Seventy, and James is on the wrong side of the TV.  
  
He is tall and broad and capable. Kendall says he has a target on his back, eyes clouded with worry, but James has never been hunted. He doesn’t know what it’s like, until he does, and  
  
There is  
  
Light  
  
A name  
  
A voice  
  
A song  
  
Fingers stroking his hair, hum hum humming…  
  
“James,” the light says, sings, screams, and James holds Kendall’s head underwater, blond hair spreading a halo, except no- it’s not Kendall at all, because Kendall isn’t here. He is watching James on a big, flat screen, beneath a logo that is green like algae,  
  
The edge of a bruise,  
  
Necrotic flesh, and  
  
Kendall’s eyes.  
  
James sucks in a breath, brackish water splashing in his lungs, and shoves the girl in his hands away. She is limp, already gone- for how long now?- and he can barely keep his head aloft. He grew up in an element, a friend a mother a nurturer, and now it is the enemy. It sucks him down, wraps icy fingers around his ankles and holds him, holds him, it will never let him go.  
  
(Puffy cheeks, distended abdomens, empty eye sockets, and that damned logo, moonlit-lagoon blue, the color of decay and death and sorrow.)  
  
But no.  
  
The logo this year, Seventy One, is supposed to be jaundice yellow, and James survived. He is free. He slogs out of his dreams, his _memories_ , reaching for the one person who is supposed to scare all the bad things away.  
  
There is no one, and there has not been for as many nights as James can count.  
  
All those evenings he spent soothing away his best friend’s nightmares have been wasted, because Kendall has not been there to do so in return. This is the truth, the truth James has learned, the truth James definitely, absolutely, unequivocally hates:  
  
Seventy and everything has changed, but Kendall has not.


End file.
